As the investigation into the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting continues, more details of that terrible day are beginning to emerge. And out of all of those horrible details, one miracle has come to light. Reportedly shooter Adam Lanza passed over an entire classroom full of terrified children -- because he wrongly thought it was empty. Wait till you hear how that happened.
In an unbelievable coincidence, the school had had a "lockdown drill" in case of this type of emergency shortly before it actually happened. That we live in a world where young children have to practice what to do if their school is shot up by a madman is bad enough, but then to actually have it happen is inconceivable.
But that drill led to an amazing happenstance: One of the first classrooms Lanza passed after he'd shot several teachers was a room that had a black piece of construction paper still taped to its door from the drill. And that led him to think the room was empty -- so he passed by it.
The teacher, Kaitlin Roig, had immediately closed the door upon hearing gunfire and sat petrified with her students, listening as Lanza spared their classroom. Unfortunately, however, he then continued into the room of substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau, who was desperately trying to hide her children in a bathroom. Lanza killed her and all of her students except one. That little survivor "played dead" until Lanza left the room.
He then continued into teacher Victoria Soto's classroom and began shooting. When his gun jammed, six children were able to escape. Call that the second miracle.
As Lanza heard police closing in, he turned the gun on himself. If only there had been more miracles that day. But at least many children were spared -- all thanks to a piece of paper.
Do you believe in miracles?
Image via ABC News
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Comments 17
So why does God get credit when good things happen but is absolved of all blame when bad things happen?
To look at it another way, you don't teach a kid a lesson by letting them break their necks. You step in, even though it doesn't let them act on their free will. I don't understand how god can justify tearing apart those families and causing such intense pain when he could have prevented it. I'm glad religion can help some people with the hard questions, but to me, it seems like a terrible set of answers to a set of difficult questions.
And I don't for a minute believe the "official" account of the massacre. What about the second shooter? What about the fact that the gun Adam supposedly used was found in the trunk of his mother's car after the shooting? What about the gun-toting guys in black that witnesses saw BEFORE emergency responders arrived on scene? It will never add up to me. So much easier for the machine to put all the blame on the autistic "freak," or even to set him up. That's how it goes now.
Why do we continue to use his face with these stories? All it reinforces in people's minds is the face of the perpetrator. We should be remembering the victims, not the shooter.
If you believe the concept of balance, in order for the "good" God to exist, He must therefore have a balance - a "devil" if you will. Modern religion seems to have eliminated the concept of an evil force playing on us, preferring, instead, to concentrate on an all-loving God. But what about that other side? Perhaps there are two sides to "God", or, if you prefer, perhaps there really IS a "devil" who gets into some psyches and causes the havoc.
So perhaps that place, and all the other places of strife in the world, are those dual forces working against each other, be they God and Devil or just plain old good and evil.
And I've seen WAY too many miracles in my life to say that they don't exist. A "miracle" does not have to be a man walking on water. It can be as simple as a child surviving a situation where he surely should have died. Or a man surviving a car wreck that should have killed him.
I think the term "miracle" is overused. It was not a miracle that those kids did not die, it is simply what is supposed to happen. Kids are supposed to go to school and come home in one piece. What happened in Newtown was the work of pure evil. One man comitted 5 minutes and 152 bullets worth of evil on 26 people.